GPP Stacking with Park Factors

GPP Stacking with Park Factors

Good morning everyone, and welcome to another edition of “GPP Stacking with Park Factors.” We have officially survived 10 weeks of baseball season, but we still have a long way to go. For those of you that might have missed any of the previous week’s installments, it’s easy to look back. Simply select “Park Factors” from the MLB FREE dropdown menu, and every piece I’ve written in this series is available for viewing.

However, if you’re too lazy or stubborn to look back, I’ll briefly explain. Each week at DraftKings, I build GPP lineups using FanGraphs park factors by handedness. A park factor is simply a relative rating of a parks aptitude for offense. Because baseball relies more on external factors such as park and weather than other sports, I’ve been tracking the successes of using the best and worst ballparks in tournaments all season long.

Below I’ve included the same sheet that I’ve been using since the second week of the MLB season which contains a final, relative ranking of the parks in the furthest column to the right.

Since the second week of the season, I’ve been using a manipulation of the FanGraphs park factors by handedness as shown below:

Each week using the sheet attached above, I select the games from the best and worst parks respectively, and load up my lineups with players from those games.

Typically I play both lineups in the Quarter Arcade ($.25 entry), however, with all the cool promotions that DraftKings is running, I thought I’d take a shot a much more cash this week.

Below are the two teams that I entered in the $250K Super Knuckleball, part of DraftKings Summer Games series. For just a $5 entry, the winner of this game took away $100,000. Spoiler alert, I didn’t win, but I gave it a good run.

The first thing I want to point out is that there were a lot of games in really good parks that night. The best park however, was Coors Field, which makes up the majority of my second team. Notice however, that on DraftKings you must have players from three different teams, that’s why there is a sprinkling of a few players from different games.

In recent weeks, I’ve been hammering home ownership percentages, and I want to point out the obvious from these two teams. First, notice how high the ownership is on the game from Coors Field. The only player with an ownership level less than 10% is Yadier Molina and his rapidly declining skills. This is what I’ve fully expected all year long when building the team with the best park. I’m not the only one who is privy to the information on park factors, and everyone else wanted a piece of Coors Field that night. While Coors Field did erupt for 14 runs, unfortunately, the majority of my team was from the St. Louis Cardinals lineup that only mustered up three runs, sending this team down into the dust without any cash.

However, my other team had a good night. Aided by the performance of Chris Sale, my Dodgers stack was able to bypass high ownership levels, and cut all the way into the top 6,000 entries, earning a minimum level cash. First, take a look at the ownership levels. Only four hitters on my team eclipsed the 10% ownership mark and all of them were still below 20% ownership. Again, this is what I’ve come to expect when trying to take advantage of the worst offensive environment on the slate. The good news for me in this instance was that even though it was a bad offensive environment, the Dodgers have a really good offense. Even having to fight out Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers were able to put up nine runs and moved this team along quite well. Unfortunately I was hampered by a zero from Joc Pederson and a measly three points from Adrian Gonzalez, perhaps the Dodgers two best hitters, but the rest of the guys picked up the slack.

I thought this was a rather fitting example of the hypothesis I shared earlier this year. In summary, “the worst parks will yield lower results more often, but have a larger upside.” That upside paired with the low ownership was right where it needed to be for this game. With most of the players on the slate locked in on the St. Louis offense, this could have been a great opportunity to capitalize elsewhere. It didn’t work out to perfection, but the process yet again succeeded.

I’ve updated the table below with the scores and ROIs for the week and the year to date. Note that my ROI stacking the worst park is actually higher than stacking the best park:

Week

Worst Park Avg.

Best Park Avg.

Worst Park ROI

Best Park ROI

Total

Week 10

100.58

103.46

28%

-71.2%

-21.6%

Season

99.50

105.40

160.24%

91.81%

126.20%

It was another small losing week, but I’m glad to see the week wasn’t entirely wasted. Again note that the total ROI took a slightly larger hit this week because of the fact that I entered a much larger game in terms of entry fee ($5) as compared to the normal Quarter Arcade. I’ll do this occasionally to try and take advantage of DraftKings promotions, but I’ll always make note of it in the experiment.

In terms of scoring, it was a pretty standard week as the averages for the week were right around the yearly averages.

I’ll look to build on the average scores and ROI next week!

Thoughts on Logan’s GPP experiment? Want to start an experiment of your own?

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